 Alex Baxter Frank Cutitta Paul DeBraccio Judy Franks Dave Hendricks Marko Hurst Jay Lauf Daniel Lagani Karen Macumber Diane Salvatore Ken Sonenclar Domenic Venuto Marta Wohrle Matthew Yorke |
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by Domenic Venuto
"It’s a good problem to have" – this is the reassuring statement we tell ourselves when faced with a deluge of opportunities we can’t possibly handle and are forced to prioritize. It’s a phrase I have heard many times over the last few months from almost everyone in the digital agency business. If you were to measure the sheer number of inbound calls, RFIs, RFPs and requests for capability meetings over the last two months there’s no doubt the advertising industry is cranking back up, ready to make up for lost time.
It’s not solely a Razorfish phenomenon. My peers, friends and colleagues at other agencies and in other markets are also experiencing the same rush for progress. The increased activity is not just from inbound requests. Existing clients are also opening up budgets and increasing their digital media spend. The growth doesn’t seem to be peculiar to any one industry, but spans across all the major industries we serve—financial services, automotive, pharmaceuticals, retail, CPG and media and entertainment.
Only a few months ago I used a hiking metaphor to describe the recession, that the only way to see the top of a mountain and the path to get there was from the bottom of a valley. It appears we didn’t walk the path, but rather leapt up four steps at a time. As fast as a one turns to a zero in a digital switch, our industry is back up and running and causing a problem that we are all happy to have.
Our excess capacity—and the industry didn’t start with much heading into 2010—is quickly getting absorbed, if not entirely. Take a look across agency Web sites and you will see pages of job openings, from account directors to art directors, copywriters to media planners and program directors to technical architects.
Advertisers aren’t the only ones freeing budgets; magazine and newspaper publishers are also in on the game. While the media money has yet to be converted to insertion orders publishers will see, their activity is noticeable with the noise and preparations being made for paid content, e-readers, mobile applications and social media initiatives. I think the industry has finally come to realize that individually these strategies and platforms aren’t the silver bullets they were hoping for, but together the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.
So nobody is standing still. It’s what I love about this industry. And dare I say that the recession may have been good for publishers and agencies. It has made us leaner, for sure. We are all doing more with less, and the strain shows. But there’s an obverse, with benefits. The scarcity has caused us to challenge the rules of convention, compared to the lip service we gave it before. Brands without editorial owners are giving publishers the opportunity to extend the reach of the assets beyond their old print containers. We are considering a variety of business models that, as short as 12 months ago, wouldn’t have even made it into a boardroom presentation. And new technologies such as the e-reader and iPad are creating excitement and interest instead of fear and denial.
It is exciting that all this activity is converging at this point in time; 2010 could very well be called the tentative tweens for the publishing industry. Perhaps it is the beginning of a renaissance of sorts as we emerge from the doldrums of layoffs, plummeting ad sales and declining circulation. Lighter in weight, we are free to innovate with our brands and content across the vast array of platforms to entertain, educate and inform consumers who (I would wager) may be ready to open their wallets as well.
Minsider columnist Domenic Venuto is SVP and Head of the Media and Entertainment Practice with the New York City office of digital agency Razorfish. He can be reached at domenic.venuto@razorfish.com.
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